Demand? Meet supply, and smile for the camera while you’re at it.
You are the competition.
So are your neighbors.
So are your kids.
Since everybody posts photos on social media apps all day long, the value of photos overall has plummeted. That’s just basic economics.
The recent announcement about two of the world‘s largest stock photography companies merging reflects this market reality. With everyone clicking and posting photos all day long with their cell phones, the challenge of finding interesting photographs isn’t especially hard. It’s worth adding that photography—and video, too, considering just how much video both of these companies also sell—not only suffers devaluation as a commodity with this merger, but also as a by-product of waning audience interest. Ubiquity breeds dispassion.
There are two things going on here. First there’s the matter about big business and how that affects creative work. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this is a story about creative devaluation. Shutterstock and Getty used to compete, and for many professional media people, each service was effectively interchangeable. They may have had different account numbers and different billing requirements, but it didn’t really matter. If you needed a picture of a giraffe nibbling acacia leaves at sunset, you could easily find one on either site.
What most people don’t realize, of course, is that each of these companies themselves already had gobbled up many other companies. Getty and Shutterstock were already giants. A range of stock footage and animation and graphics and even audio services operated beneath the shade of their umbrellas. If this new merger between their front offices survives anti-trust scrutiny, we’ll effectively be left with one behemoth to rule them all.
Does anybody care? Should we care? I’m not worried in terms of finding that singular giraffe image, or any other easily identifiable asset that I may need for a quick turnaround production. I worry for reasons that lurk beneath the surface like shallow rocks at the shoreline.
This concern is really a subset of overall consternation about the seemingly inexorable trend towards corporate consolidation in all industries. Every week we seem to hear that there are fewer and fewer big corporate holding companies that essentially regulate all aspects of modern life. Most people don’t realize that the marquee names they all know are often bulwarks behind which countless other companies purport to operate under their own banners. Most people don’t realize, in other words, that so many big banners are actually just pixelations comprised of a slew of smaller banners.
For creative people and the work they do this troubles me. The more we face narrower corporate uniformity, the harder it is for fresh voices to find purchase in the global marketplace. The more that creative work must conform to the dictates of mega-corporations, the more we smear the lines of distinction and voice and purpose. If this merger goes through and you’re a pro photographer looking to sell your work as stock, for example, you’ll have essentially just one place where it might be showcased in any meaningful way. Sure, you can post it on social media or your own websites as much as you want, but if you’re trying to do mainstream business, you’re essentially going to be left with only one place to negotiate. As the saying goes, the power of the free press only matters if you happen to own one.
As much as some participants may try to pretend otherwise, creative work often concerns pure commerce. A client needs something—an image, a tune, a video, a hand-carved wooden table—and an artist fills that need. But clearly the souls of artists move from forces far more complex than making a sale. Artists need to make things. They need to make sales to keep making things. Sometimes the can make a living by doing both—making and then selling—but the point is that when the marketplace consolidates, artists have a tougher time selling. That means they then have a harder time making, and because of that, overall culture retreats, becoming duller and grayer.
And who wants to live in a monolithic culture?